The other Portland

The city of Portland, Maine, suffers from confusion with its west coast counterpart, the hip town of Portland, Oregon. Though it presents a sleepy facade, there's a bustling art and activist scene to discover once you scratch the surface. I visited during an ice storm which froze the town, but warmed the citizens.

THE LIGHTS of the eastern seaboard glow like phosphorus in seawater as I fly in to Portland. We land early, so I spend forty minutes studying tourist brochures near the baggage carousel of the curiously-named Portland International Jetport. With a name like that, one might expect a futuristic launching pad for galactic travels, rather than a sleepy six-gate regional route-ender. “Welcome to Maine,” a sign read in an ugly bold and rounded san-serif. The bored tourist information lady exchanges weather reports with a lazy janitor leaning on his mop. They discuss meteorology like mariners here. “I hear we’re in for a nor-wester at ten knots.” “That’s what they say. It’s already 10 outside.” I brighten at the prospect of a 10 degree night in mid December, forgetting for a moment that they’re talking in Fahrenheit, not Celsius. Upon the realization, I pull my scarf tighter.

I GAVE UP paying for accommodation several years ago. There’s no need, when people are willing to shelter you for free. You must simply be prepared to lower your standards of comfort, and be ready to meet some interesting characters. “You never know who you could run into,” one relative told me once, shocked at my open attitude toward my travelling arrangements. To which I replied – “That’s precisely the point.”
Through couchsurfing.com I meet Ani, who described her living space as “the loft of a collectively-run art space.” Called The Dooryard, the space is a ramshackle two-floor zone of free thinking and creation. Its walls are plastered with posters, the air thick with the smell of cooking oil wafting from the restaurant downstairs. Home produced zines – typewritten and photocopied – are scattered about on bench space. On the first floor is a large hall with several old couches facing a stage and a well-used upright piano. Upstairs is a rehearsal studio, a work room and a crusty kitchen.
I arrive at the tail-end of a meeting of Earth Firsters, a radical environmental defence group. “We’re planning some actions to challenge the timber industry in the north of Maine,” one of the black-clad activists tells me, Pabst beer can in hand. “Up there the logging companies are spraying so many chemicals it’s killing the earth. Heard of Agent Orange? Well, they’re spraying the same shit to defoliate forests here as they did in Vietnam. The families up there who have logged the forests responsibly for generations are seeing their environments destroyed overnight.”
Portland is a small town, and it’s the biggest in Maine. Most of the locals I meet have a refreshing attitude – they are savvy, liberal north-easters, yet they carry the calm understanding infused from their natural surroundings. There’s an unquantifiable reckless streak in them. “This is a frontier state,” one tells me, “Or, as close to frontier as you’ll find in the east.”
Despite their liberal leanings, some are quite rural. I overhear a conversation about firearms. “I knew I was back home in Maine when my friend invited me around to check out her gun.” In Maine, when someone shows you the long side of their gun, it’s a sign of friendship.
I locate Ani, my host, a bright girl with a head of dreadlocked brown hair and glasses with thick black plastic rims. As we set out on a walk to find dinner, she tells me of her recent trip across the country, hopping freight trains all the way. “It’s good to have someone to teach you how to do it,” she says of the practice, which is becoming as common today as it was in the depression era. “So many kids do it these days. Some railway workers help you out, telling you where trains are going. You can also find out from train watchers’ schedule books. But the bulls get real mad if they catch you. I got in trouble coming down from Canada because I hopped the border. I spent the night in jail.”
All the restaurants are closed, so we find pasta and sauce at the 7-11 and cook a basic dinner on the hotplate at The Dooryard. Ani shows me my mattress in a loft above the performance stage, accessed by a shaky ladder. I sleep under a pile of five sleeping bags, but my face is still icy cold during the windy night.

THE COLD IS the reason I’m invited the next night to stay at Monroe, one of Portland’s nicknamed sharehouses. Fabylon, Corral Street and Greenleaf are some of the other long-established ‘punk houses’, as is Bangarang, a mostly queer commune named after the battle cry of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys which produces its own zine. Monroe is simply named after its street.
I’m invited there by Ahna, a resident of Monroe (there are many – some temporary, some permanent. During my stay, the boys Josh and Julian were ecstatic over the discovery of a secret room on the third floor of the house that will allow them to extend the community even further). I earn my keep by helping Ahna poster the streets for several upcoming events at The Dooryard. We hand out flyers at a local funky art-craft market at Space, a large community hall, where creative folks are selling their wares. I spy posters for past gigs by the likes of Richard Thompson and Ludon Wainwright. Portland isn’t far off the cultural radar, then. Our postering and flyering takes almost two hours as Ahna stops constantly to greet friends on the icy streets.
Hungry, we head to the Thai Buffet on Ahna’s recommendation. “It’s cheap and doesn’t entirely suck.” It’s nearly 9.30pm, so we’ve missed the buffet (not a tragedy, judging by the half-empty trays I see a kitchen hand clearing away). We order from the menu, on which is printed the photograph of a stunningly beautiful Thai woman. “That’s the sister of the restaurant’s owner. She died in a fire at their old restaurant across town,” Ahna tells me. A bubbly waitress takes our order. “No drinks for me, I’m travelling on a budget,” I tell her. “Honey, why didn’t you say so? Drinks are on me,” she replies, and slips me a few dollar bills from her apron pouch. Only minutes previous, she’d been telling us about her seven-day two-job working week. I might be on a budget, but I’d feel mortified taking the tip money of an overworked waitress. I leave the gifted money plus some with the balance of our bill.

MAINE is hit by an ice storm during the night. We awake to find the streets covered in several millimetres of treacherously slick ice. Walking is nearly impossible. Accidents occur at every corner. Shopkeepers shovel salt onto the footpaths. We slide around the corner to the North Star, a warm community coffee shop where folk singers play afternoon acoustic sets. Today it’s abuzz with stories of ice-related tragedies. “I just saw five cars crushed by a huge shelf of ice falling from a building in town,” someone says.
At the North Star I meet Jono, a man I’ve heard a lot about since arriving at The Dooryard. Jono was playing hand drums on the street outside the town library busking for change when the police – prompted by complaints from the librarians – arrested him, firstly for trespassing, and secondly for resisting arrest. “I wasn’t going to let them arrest me when I hadn’t done anything illegal. In Portland, it’s legal to perform anywhere without a permit. And the street and the library are public land, so how could I be trespassing?” The police confiscated his drums and the twenty dollars he had earned. Locals tell me plenty of people play music in front of the library without problems. They suspect the librarians and the police took a different attitude toward Jono because he is large and black. They are planning a protest action in the future in which hundreds of people will play drums in front of the library, demanding Jono be cleared of any charges and have his drums returned.
I briefly contemplate staying in Maine to participate in the giant drum protest, but I've got a ride down the I-95 toward New York. My driver is Scott Beiben, host of The Lost Film Fest, a travelling roadshow of underground films and documentaries. I met Scott at The Dooryard, where he presented his interactive film session to a small crowd of local activists and artists. We huddled under blankets while the ice storm howled outside as Scott danced around, explaining the significance of the footage being beamed onto the paint-flaked wall.
Scott tells me all about his next project - promoting the new Yes Men film at Sundance - as we cruise down the salt-dusted highway. Five days ago I flew the reverse route north, and observed the eastern seaboard from the air. Now we're straddling teh great urban megapolis of BosNyWash at tarmac level, from where it looks equally bright and anonymous.

Behind The Wheel: Scott Beibin, Lost Film Fest from Tao Ruspoli on Vimeo.

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Philadelphia - "Like A Dirty Hobo Wearing Sweatpants"

We arrive in Philadelphia bleary-eyed after our night of partying in Brooklyn. The impaired capacity of my tired eyes isn't to blame for the unsightly outlook, though, Scott assured me. Philly is just plain ugly.

It’s a derelict city that looks like something out of the Great Depression, marred further by the addition of several truly hideous skyscrapers, and the destruction of its only cultural quarter.
“Philly is like a hobo wearing dirty sweatpants,” Scott says as we steer along Market Street, which used to be one of the world’s great centres of jazz.

The long avenue was lined with clubs and theatres hosting the likes of John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie. However Market Street, and the black neighbourhood that fed it, was mowed to the ground by the city to make way for hulking university and corporate buildings.
“They cleared the area by declaring one in every few houses condemned, then acquiring the surrounding properties forcibly. It was an act of collusion between the city and the university.”
So why does Scott live here? Well, due to its deteriorated state, Philly is attracting a scene of artists and activists who are reshaping the city. They arrived with the Republican National Convention of 2000, an event that is always shadowed by a circus of demonstrations (this convention in particular deserved protest – it was where Bush and Cheney received their fateful party nominations). In the aftermath of the street protests, hundreds of activists found themselves stuck in Philly, required to appear in court. They occupied run-down row houses in West Philly, waiting for their court dates. Many simply stayed there.
Scott bought his row house for about $10,000. There are still houses on sale for that amount or less in the unloved cities of America – particularly Detroit, a city which is following the fortunes of its automobile companies (see this video to understand how much Detroit has deteriorated).
Scott only regrets not buying whole blocks of houses, disconnecting them from the power grid, closing the streets to car traffic and creating a green village for likeminded people, as some groups are doing in deteriorated cities.
West Philly is still rough, but lovable. Scott stands on his porch and holds conversations with passing locals. We drive around and inspect boarded-up old theatres and walls covered in paint-and-tile murals (they love their murals in Philly). There’s an Ethiopian restaurant on one corner (“one of the three top Ethiopian kitchens in the country,” Scott informs me authoratively), and a donut shop on the other, testifying to the ethnic diversity.
I leave Philly on the Chinatown bus, captained by a giant black driver who seems to know most of the passengers by name. I fall asleep as Philadelphia’s ugly skyline disappears from view, and awake to a glimpse of the gleaming white dome of the congress building. We have arrived in DC.

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Washington, Obamaland

Washington, I discover, is benefiting from a tourism boom fueled by Barack Obama (not unlike London, which regards the Queen as a tourist attraction herself). Shop windows are full of t-shirts and trinkets adorned with his broad toothy smile. His name is constantly overheard on streets and subways.

In front of the White House, workers are erecting a temporary stand on which Obama will swear his vows of office (see photo below). The impending inauguration has become one of the hottest tickets in the US. Hundreds of thousands of visitors will swamp DC for the event. Every hotel bed in town is booked, leading local citizens to let out their houses for tens of thousands of dollars. While trying to couchsurf, I ran into trouble – even now, weeks before the event, the town is filling up. “DC to benefit from inauguration windfall,” the local paper trumpets.
My friend Scott is calling in all favours to get a ticket to an inauguration party. He is Bill Ayer’s publicity manager, and had a role to play in helping quell the controversy over his client during the campaign (for some balanced non-Palinized information about Ayers, watch the film The Weather Underground, or at least, this lucid television interview he gave recently).
“Bush’s inauguration was an ignored formality. This one is historic, and everyone wants to be there,” Scott tells me.

The purpose of my visit to Washington is to research typography in the archives of The Smithsonian Institute. That’s how I find myself outside the Museum of American History at 8.20am on an unexpectedly sunny morning in mid December, waiting for the doors to open. To my right stands the great phallic Washington Monument, to my left the cupola dome of congress. As I wait, I read the words of James Smithson inscribed in proud Trajan in the sandstone façade of the museum: “No ignorance is probably without loss to him, no error without evil.”
I reach Joan Boudreau in the Graphic Arts Department of the museum, telephoning from the lobby. All this way, and I have to communicate by phone. Why are people afraid to meet face-to-face these days?
“I’ve located the documents you are after,” Joan tells me after I wait an hour (during which I wandered about the museum, inspecting the famous Hole-Tattered Banner, and a rather pathetic gallery of book design which gave only a cursory nod to typography – one limited to gaudy picto-scripts).
“We have 27 sets of drawings from the Lanston Monotype Corporation. Unfortunately they are located in a facility out of the city which has been closed for almost ten years due to asbestos contamination. We were hoping it would be reopened by now, but it has since been found to have a problem with lead contamination as well. Neither you or I can go in there. It will be open again once the health hazards are removed, but that’s at the mercy of federal funding, which as you know is a bit stretched right now.”
The situation would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. The Smithsonian, one of the richest museums in the world, leaves an entire building full of invaluable historic documents locked up for more than a decade, with an indefinite timeline for reopening and no budget for repairs.
I have travelled thousands of kilometres, spent more than a thousand dollars, conducted days of interviews, and all to discover that the crucial piece of evidence is hopelessly inaccessible.
Smithson was right. This ignorance is certainly not without loss to me.
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Roadkill and Dumpster Diving

I learn about America's silent food revolution in Asheville, North Carolina.

THE WALK from the roadside to Josh and Mel’s cabin is a slippery stumble down a steep track. The hillside is thick, the path invisible underfoot. The entrance to the track is shielded from view, just as the hut itself is hidden behind thick stands of rivercane. They are squatting the land, and would prefer their occupancy to go unnoticed. The hut itself is tiny – perhaps four meters by three, with a single bed, a bench and stove, and a thin strip of floor space. Tonight it’s warm out, even in the week before Christmas.
Josh produces a cardboard carton full of dumpster-rescued food. Dumpsters are their primary source of food, as well as roadkill, forest plants, and the occasional café meal.

Supermarkets in the US dispose of products at their “sell-by” date, which is often a week before the used-by date. Perfectly edible food gets sent to the dumpster. Tonight they have procured tuna steaks and vegetables, which Josh concocts into a spicy curry, served up with potent home-fermented sauerkraut. We talk into the night of their plans to squat a national forest, living off the land in shelters made from tree bark. They want to move soon, despite the onset of winter. Josh says it is important to get to know the terrain while it is stark and bare, before it is hidden by spring’s verdant cloak. Before the rhododendron grow as thick as walls. He tells me of the botanical history of the region, the native knowledge of the land, of introduced species which have choked ecology. Mel tells me of her fascination with birdsong, how she taught herself to identify the birds of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and can recognize the arrival of migratory species by the change in their tune.
As we fall asleep, Josh tells me that the food pyramid doesn’t represent the true dietary requirements of the human body. It’s a capitalist agrarian plot to make Americans buy certain foods, he insists. I fall asleep on a pallet of blankets on the floor, listening to mice scratching a home in the roof of the hut.

I MET MEL in Tallinn two summers ago. It was a glorious protracted season of warm days and long twilight nights. She occupied the attic of a hostel I frequently visited. We became friends as we played country music together – she on ukulele, me singing badly. A real hobo, she told me stories of riding through the Rocky Mountains in an open carriage of a freight train. She embodies the alternate voice of that country – one that speaks for a return to the land, to share, to create, to care. She informed me of the existence of towns like Asheville, little pockets of resistance against greed-based culture. When I learned of my impending research trip to the US, I promptly emailed her to request an immersion into her lifestyle.

THE NEXT DAY we visit Caleb’s House, a large comfortable wood-floored house in a quiet forested outskirt suburb of Asheville near the banks of the French Broad River. The house is at the bottom of a long country road which twists up the folds of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a name well deserved by those beautiful hazy hills.
Caleb's House is somewhat of a drop-in centre for a large group of Asheville locals. They come here to cook their dumpster-rescued food, to skin the hides of deer which they sew into clothing (see photo, right) to chill-out, play music, and to sleep. Dozens of large glass jars filled with mysteriously coloured liquids bubble away on the benches – batches of moonshine, fermenting and belching (see photo, below). Outside in the yard, the air is piquant with the whiff of rotting meat from the deer carcasses hanging on tree branches.
Caleb is the caretaker of the house. He is bound to a wheelchair after a felled tree crushed his legs in the woods. A series of ramps help him traverse the yard. With his house open to friends and strangers, he is never short of help if he needs it.
I curl up on the couch with a glass of invigorating kombucha tea, and read about passive resistance through food in the book “The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved” by Sandor Katz. People across the US are fighting against the standardization of their food through rules and regulations that were introduced to protect people against poor food quality, but have now begun to have the opposite effect: Collectives of unpasteurised milk drinkers, home baking circles, roadkill eaters (nearly all meat is safe as long as you cook it long enough), and seed savers (a fascinating movement of people working against the corporate ownership of seed varieties). Two dogs lie at my feet as I read, the Blue Heeler pup Satchel, who chews my socks, and the large and lazy Bob, a Wolf cross-breed.
Several characters pass through the Caleb's House during the day, which is warm but wet enough to keep us indoors. They wear patchwork clothes and hand-stitched hides. They come from all across America, but have found new homes in rural communities (like the queer eco-farms in Tennessee, Ida and Short Mountain Sanctuary), and float between free-thinking oases like Asheville, Olympia, the two Portlands and New Orleans.
I hear many stories about New Orleans: After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of punk kids travelled down to Louisiana to help clean up the mess. Many arrived before the National Guard or FEMA. Unofficial collectives did the majority of the work in the Ninth Ward, while the government squabbled over jurisdiction and responsibility. In the months and years that have followed, waves of young people have landed in the city to lend a hand. They talk about “Katrina mud,” the putrid sludge of sewerage, river silt and pollutants they scooped and carried bucket-by-bucket. They remember the plastic smell of the FEMA trailers, the shoddy and overpriced emergency shelter vans sent in as temporary housing. In some locations, they were parked row-by-row, surrounded by wire and kept under floodlights – America’s own refugee camps.
“I don’t think any other city would have drawn such a response,” Mel tells me. “New Orleans was a very important cross-over point for travelling folk. We had all spent time there, or had friends who did.”

“STOP THE CAR! I spotted a possum back there,” says Mel. She jumps out of the passenger side door and jogs up the mountain road to fetch her claim. It was the first piece of roadkill we found during our afternoon drive through the rollercoaster hill roads of Madison County. Mel had been hoping for a substantially larger animal, for she had hoped to bring her family deer steaks for Christmas dinner. Whether her family would have appreciated the roadkill offering is another matter.
She returns with a rather toothy looking black-and-white creature. America’s possums are considerably uglier than Australia’s. “I could skin it and use the fur. We could cook the meat, if it isn’t bad yet.”
The possum is hung in the tree back at Caleb’s house for later butchering, alongside several deer carcasses rescued from the dumpster of a nearby slaughterhouse.

LATER WE LOITER in Asheville’s main streets. It’s refreshing to see a community centre retained in the face of the Wal-Martization of America. We stop in at a bookshop to read zines, and then hang around the co-op food store talking to locals. We head to ‘the bins’, the discount per-kilo Goodwill outlet, where Mel finds some wool clothes for her forest-dwelling season (see photo, right).
Our last stop of the night is the dumpster of an organic supermarket. Josh and Mel strap on headlamps and start pulling out bags of rubbish, tearing them open and digging through the trash. I stand by, wanting to help, but restrained by first-timer’s fright. I’ve seen the food they have at home – the unspoilt meats and vegetables, barely-stale bread loaves and just-overdue dairies, from which they create the most delicious and wholesome meals. But this dumpster session yields nothing but true rubbish, to my sensitive eyes anyhow. Josh finds about a kilo of shredded pork, unwrapped and flecked with chewing tobacco. He picks off the tobacco, sniffs at it, and declares it edible. At that point I feel uncomfortable and slink back to the car to wait.
Later, when they cook and serve dinner, Josh gives me a pork-free portion of vegetables he cooked separately. I’m sure they’re secretly offended at my comfortable city lifestyle.

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Strip malls and parking lots - the aesthetic of America

The landscape of Columbia, South Carolina, is a monotonous conglomeration of strip malls, parking lots, highways and fast food outlets. There’s nothing to do in this town but shop, drive and eat. The only respite for the eyes is the occasional stand of forest, and even that is being felled for development.

This is the aesthetic of southern America. This is the heart of the monster, the birthplace of Coca-Cola and the fast food chain – and for every franchise that launched its spawn across the globe, there are a dozen that never made it out of the south. They remain here with their wacky names and neon signs, their curious not-quite-so-well-formulated menu concepts, relics from a bygone era of American cultural imperialism.

Hardee’s promises us “charbroiled burgers”, an unappetising process that sounds like boiling burnt meat. There’s Sub Station II, which never fully explains what became of its predecessor. Miami Subs & Grill crawled as far north as South Carolina, but no further. Dairy Dream did even worse than the chain it sought to emulate. On its sign Taco Bell asks us “Why pay more?” A question easily answered by anyone who has actually eaten their product.

MY COUSIN Gabriel took me for a drive in his father’s pick-up truck along Two Notch Road, a choked thoroughfare that carries the majority of the mall traffic. Even ten years ago, during my last visit, this road bore on its flanks parking lot-after-parking lot, anterooms to the big box cathedrals of consumerism. Now the shopping sprawl extends miles and miles beyond its former boundary as development pushes further out into the suburbs.

The mushrooming megamalls are an illusion of prosperity, however, for the represent the replacement, not duplication, of retail outlets. On the other side of town stands the Richland Fashion Mall, a multi-level modern facility that a decade ago housed several department stores and hundreds of smaller boutiques. Today it is a ghost mall. All but one of the department stores and a handful of boutiques remain. It’s a scene repeated at Columbia Mall, which was the bustling heart of the north-east side of town – now abandoned to the discount retailers. All across Columbia stand the hulking frames of decommissioned big box outlets, and, nearby, the instantly-recognisable shells of closed fast food joints. The corporations that inflicted this visual pollution on the suburban landscape have departed for more profitable locations, leaving their legacy of architectural decay.
Trundling ahead of us in traffic is an empty MTA bus. Comically, the bus is designed to resemble an old trolley car. The irony is that Columbia has never had an effective public transport system – bus, trolley car or train – and the transit options that do exist are shunned by citizens (particularly the white folk) out of class stigma. It’s an automobile or nothing in this town – one for every family member, preferably.
It’s not as if the city has no options – they just chose to ignore them. For instance, Columbia is criss-crossed by railway corridors, most of them used by freight trains. With a little tinkering, these tracks could be put to use for suburban commuter trains. Whenever I offered this suggestion to a Columbian, they would return a blank look that sought to ask “Why? We’re perfectly happy in our cars.”
The blossoming suburbs of Columbia are examples of another curious trend in urban development – the commoditization of location names. In the past, our town and suburb names reflected something about the local area – the history, the environment, the settling families, notable events, national leaders. Today place names are determined by developers whose primary interest is selling land. They chose names that will sound appealing in advertisements. Thus, Columbia is home to Windmill Orchard (where no windmill or orchard ever stood), North Trace, Wildewood, Spring Valley, and so on. Surely developers should be required to adopt more reflective names.
Columbia, like many American cities, suffers from dead heart syndrome. The redbrick downtown has long been abandoned for the ‘burbs. Main Street, the only semblance of a community-friendly streetfront, is home to several wig shops, ghostly bank buildings and little else. I wonder if the prevalence of giant church auditoriums across the city is a reaction to the loss of human-oriented city planning. With no interactive streets, plazas or parks in which to meet, people flock to the ostentatious modern cathedrals in search of some sense of community.
On the last day of my visit to my relatives, the New York Times ran a front page story featuring Columbia as a “snapshot of America’s economic woes." I didn’t come into contact with anyone yet affected by rising unemployment, but I saw plenty of signs of social decay.

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Welcome to new New York

New York is a city in flux. With the ruination of its largest industry - finance - the city is entering a period of exciting unpredictability. I met a group of young entrepreneurs who see the collapse as an opportunity, not a crisis.

THE TRAFFIC in New York is eerily quiet. There’s a $350 fine for horn-honking, so nobody makes a sound. Thousands of automobiles move about silently, like schools of fish through an aquarium.
Scott steers calmly through the streets of downtown Manhattan with a mobile phone glued to his ear. This is a man who knows everybody, and takes time to talk to all of them. Short, wiry-haired, with glasses and animated hands, Scott charms everyone he meets. Nobody is unimportant to him, despite his huge list of contacts. Which is why he can drive into any city and find friends on any street corner.

He did exactly that when we drove in to Boston’s Chinatown, looking for a vegan Thai restaurant. We had just rolled down the I-95 from Portland, Maine, a trip made entertaining by Scott’s expounded theories on the economic forecast for 2009 (“Nobody knows what will happen… The biggest corporations and governments in existence could completely implode… It’s a very exciting time.”). Upon parking his van in a sidestreet, Scott walked less than a block through Chinatown before stumbling upon an entire party of acquaintances, who we then joined for dinner (They were a group of middle-aged peace activists, among them were some of the founders of the Food Not Bombs movement). (After dinner we were invited to a hipster party in Jamaica Plain where white kids danced around to treble-heavy electro music, and a drunk college girl told me: “I just got laid off – I feel like an NPR news story.”)
It happens again in New York as we drift through SoHo at 9pm on a cold Saturday. We stop at a set of lights between Little Italy and Chinatown. A young man and woman wearing santa hats stand lighting cigarettes on the street corner. I’m not even surprised when Scott pops open his door (his window is broken) and yells hello to the man. The pair strikes up a conversation as I laugh silently at the magnetism and sheer luck that surrounds this man. “I’m beginning to think this is all some kind of set-up,” I tell him, as we steer into a parking spot. Scott’s friend has invited us inside a nearby shop. We head inside.

THE SHOP IS called The 1929, named after the year of the Great Depression. It’s a pop-up store opened by a trio of rebellious Hassidic Jews who are an example of the kind of culture that has been inspired by the not-so-tragic economic collapse. As landlords struggle to sell or lease property, they are more open to allowing young artists to use their spaces for temporary projects. Fast-talking Aaron Genuth tells me they conceived the store four weeks ago, and after a two-week crash renovation, they opened. The 1929 sells clothing and art from local designers, and downstairs it hosts art shows and parties.
“You’re going to see more of this kind of culture as the shock sets in,” Scott predicts, “The economy is put-a-fork-in-it done, and people are finding new ways to do things.”

I MET SCOTT at The Dooryard in Portland, where he was hosting The Lost Film Fest, a travelling video presentation of underground films and clips. Scott acts as VJ and MC during the presentation, explaining the significance of each video and enlightening his audience.
Scott was one of the people behind the infamous New York Times prank several months ago, during which thousands of fake newspaper issues were handed out across Manhattan.
He agreed to give me a ride down the I-95 to New York the following day.

BACK IN NEW York a week later, I check into a cheap flop-house on the Lower East Side at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. Not satisfied with the security of my luggage, I walk it around to The 1929 store, the pop-up shop on the corner of Mott and Broome Streets. Aaron greeted me warmly and invited me to hang out for the night.
The creatively-decorated shop quickly fills up with a cast of funky characters, all somehow connected to the boys’ energetic circle. Lapsed Hassidic Jews, models, designer, comedians, authors – it was impossible to guess who would walk in next. The most enthusiastic among them was Levi Ukunov, a frizzy-haired guy of about 27 who speed-read my magazine and told me “I love it, I love it, it’s fantastic,” then sweet-talked me into helping him distribute to Europe his hot new design item – bubbly raincoats stuffed with goose down. The cartoony jackets were flying out the door of their hastily-renovated temporary store. Levi is another person excited by the opportunities created by the economic shift. He has just opened a small workshop in Brooklyn manufacturing clothes.
Later, while sitting on couches in the basement, I overhear a discussion about a project to take over a large building in New York as a green zone, disconnect it from the power grid and power it with solar and wind generators, and run it as a performance space. New York suddenly seems a lot more interesting than the over-moneyed self-important city it was a year ago.
On the train to JFK Airport, I think about the characters I have met during my three-week visit and the inspiration they have provided me. I think also about my money woes – a frozen credit card, five dollars cash and no way to get home from Amsterdam to Berlin. I think about the humiliating email I sent to my brother asking for a money transfer – this after a week in which I lost $400 cash, flew a hitch-hiking sign on the way out of Charlotte Airport, ate (delicious) dumpster-rescue food, stopped to pick up roadkill, and survived 18 out of 20 nights in the hospitality of strangers, friends and family. “You have such a free life,” two people told me this week. Free, yes – cheap, poor, enjoyable, unpredictable. As long as you don’t mind lowering your standards of comfort and luxury a little. The pay-off is a life less ordinary.

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